The Effect of Creative Teaching and Critical Teaching on Iranian EFL Learners' Writing Ability

Zahra Rezaei Fard, Mohammad Reza Talebinejad

Abstract


Creative and critical teaching are known as two cognitive teaching methods which the former allows learners to create new and innovative ideas, associate it with other ideas, and the latter provides problem-solving activities, raising questions, teaching logical reasoning, evaluating others’ arguments. The present study aims to explore the impact of creative teaching and critical teaching on Iranian EFL learners' writing performance. To do so, 60 EFL learners who were non-randomly selected based on their performance on Preliminary English Test (PET). Then, the selected participants of the study were randomly assigned to two equal groups of creative teaching (n = 30) and critical teaching (n = 30). Writing instruction was presented in two manners. In the creative teaching group, six-step teaching procedure (warm up, direct analogy, personal analogy, compressed conflict, new direct analogy and reexamination of the original situation or problem) was administered in an innovative way to teach writing. In the critical teaching group, learners' prior knowledge about the writing subject was provoked and by practicing critical teaching skills, they wrote an essay. The results of paired sample t-test showed that both creative and critical teaching have significant effects on essay writing of Iranian EFL intermediate learners. The results of independent sample t-test showed that there is a significant difference between creative teaching and critical teaching in their impact on the writing of Iranian EFL intermediate learners. In fact, creative teaching proved to be more effective than critical teaching. The findings of the present study may help EFL teachers to solve the learners' problems in writing, develop their communication, reasoning, and critical thinking skills and improve their writing ability.


Keywords


EFL teachers, critical teaching, creative teaching, writing performance

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References


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